


Incorruptible

by Anjou



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Season/Series 07, post-ep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-07
Updated: 2015-09-07
Packaged: 2018-04-19 13:55:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4748840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anjou/pseuds/Anjou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A submission for an epistolary challenge on the Scullyfic/E-muse list in January of 2000. Set mid-season 7, immediately after the events of <i>Orison</i>, when Scully has been faced with an evil from her past. Mytharc heavy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Incorruptible

*~*

Dear Fox,

I am unsure whether or not this letter will ever reach you, which makes me wonder exactly for whom I am writing it. I have no time to ponder the deeper meanings behind my actions. Ironically, that's a habit I acquired long before I knew what it truly meant to have no time, as I do now.

Having begun this letter, I find I don't know what to say. Will it please you to hear that at the end of my life I realize that I have accomplished nothing? That I know my one last act of graciousness will do little to work toward the redemption of my soul? I could claim that I did not know the depth of the evil in which I was mired, but I cannot exactly lie to you anymore. I know that you had a good look inside the depths of my hidden subconscious. The truth of the matter is that I did not want to know. 

I've always considered myself to be a pragmatist. When the fact of impending colonization was divulged to me, I knew that I had to act in some way. I did not hesitate to join with the men that you consider to be your enemies in their plan for survival. Even after I got to know and understand you better, I still believed that, in the end, you would be glad of your life and the role that I had played in saving it. In retrospect, I see how badly I misread you, a mistake that I am not alone in having made. 

My assignment to the X-Files was not a mistake. I was supposed to validate you, to give you an ally in purpose and in your quest. I believe that we worked well together; I know that the love I already felt for you grew almost immediately. That was part of the reason I was chosen, you know. I was chosen because a man like you, a man with a distinct but extraordinarily high goal, would appeal to me. I am not one to fall for a man of normal ambition. My mistake was in believing that, in tethering myself to your life, I had become an integral part of it. 

It was always planned that I would leave you. They had studied you, knew your history of abandonment and isolation. They reasoned that, having finally found it, you would be immobilized by the loss of love from your life and rendered unable to work. When I left, you were supposed to follow me instead of your ambition. When you did not, I was crushed. I say this not to excuse what I did next, but as a statement of fact. It was years before I understood your life had prepared you to be left, had almost instilled an expectation for abandonment within you. I was just one more, not entirely unexpected, loss. 

When they sent her to you, it was supposed to make you miss me all the more. The expectation was that sending you someone who refused to validate your theories would make you demand my return and centralize my place in your life as a helpmate. They never counted on how much you love a challenge, never dreamed that resistance was the force that had defined your life and made you the man you had become. They chose you the perfect partner, all right. She just wasn't me. 

She confounded them in other ways as well, as I read from the reports. She wasn't as rigid as they had supposed, wasn't quite as unwilling to listen to wild theories as her psych testing had led them to believe. They had forgotten that the fundamental tenet of science is curiosity, the desire to discover and understand. Her work actually began to validate yours in a way that was fundamentally dangerous to them. 

Her abduction was not planned, but it afforded them an opportunity. They took her with the idea of reprogramming her to their will, to make her conform to their plan. The physical experimentation was secondary, simply a matter of happenstance. It was the brainwashing that they wanted to accomplish. It didn't work. I read the reports and one word leapt off the page at me. "Incorruptible," it said. Dana Scully was incorruptible. Under hypnosis, she repeatedly refused to alter data, or to lose or contaminate test results. "That would be wrong," she kept saying, over and over. "I cannot do that." Not "I will not," not "I could not." "I can not." Definitive, clear, unequivocal.

Eventually, they gave up and used her for the physical experiments, reasoning that the chip, at least, would give them a modicum of control over her. In that they have been proven wrong as well. I don't mean because she discovered and removed it, prompting the onset of her cancer. There have been two callings since the one at Ruskin Dam in Pennsylvania. She has resisted both of them. No one is quite sure how she does it, but she does.

Obviously, I received reports on you as well. You were observed meeting with her mother and wandering around the city like a ghost when you weren't purposefully searching for her. Here, right in front of me, was the evidence of the longing I so wanted to see expressed for me. The pictures showed you to be thin and sleepless, with rings under your beautiful eyes. I convinced myself that you felt guilty because she had been taken, reminded myself that the desire to protect the innocent is preeminent within your nature. I willed myself to believe it was nothing more than this. Even though your letters stopped coming, I convinced myself that you loved me still.

On the day when I got the report in which it was noted that you were wearing her cross, something within me snapped. I cried for the first time since I had left D.C. and gave into some of the doubts that I had. He came to me that night.

In retrospect, I think he may have planned this all from the beginning. It is not egotism on my part to think so. He was always covetous of whatever your father had. I believe now that this extended to you as well. There is, of course, a more incisive possibility as well. He loves to corrupt. 

I could say that I was angry, or melancholy, or confused, but it was far more simple than that. He wanted me. And although I would not admit it to myself, even until today, I knew that you did not want me in the same way anymore. 

I am not incorruptible, but you have seen into my mind and I pray that you remember how much I did love you. I did, Fox, despite the subterfuge and the secrets that I kept from you. I guess the only proof I have to offer is that I could not let you die because of him.

All along, I believed that I was doing this for a purpose, that the ends would justify the means when we survived the coming holocaust. I believed that he would not kill you, despite what he had done to Jeffrey, Cassandra and probably to Samantha. Do you know that he believes that he is your father? He told me years ago that he was, but at the time he made it seem as if he considered himself to be your spiritual father, inserting himself in that role because Bill Mulder was so inadequate. Bill was weak, he told me, and I believed him. Your father was drunk and pitiful when I met him, corroborating what I had been told. I never considered what had made him that way.

You were bright, he told me, far more intelligent than Bill, far more like your mother. You were special, he said, and I believed him. I saw that for myself and I loved you for it.

When you were transformed into the thing they had tried to force nature to produce all these years, he was giddy. I thought it was pride. He had convinced me that you were his son by this time, a fact I thought would protect you. 

I have been such a fool. All along, his intent was to strip you of your gift and to take it for himself, leaving you to the fate he had created. You were no longer of any use to him.

I finally realize this was never about saving the world for the few that could survive to adapt and eventually return humans to power, but that it was always about his own survival. Maybe this had not been true for all the others, those men who came to El Rico so trustingly with the families they had worked so long and secretively to save, but it is true of him. Where was his family at El Rico? Cassandra was there, but not because she wanted to be. He never even warned Jeffrey. Of all the people who came to El Rico the night of the burning, only he and I arrived alone. At least I wanted you to go with me.

I realize now that he cares for nothing but himself in all of this, that all his machinations are only about his own survival. I do not believe that you are his son, merely that he wants it to be true because his own son proved so disappointing to him.

Poor Jeffrey. He was able to redeem himself in the end, a statement I write with some bitterness. He was given a chance I shall not receive. Then again, he was never in as deep as I am. I don't believe the same redemption will be available to me, as I will die with far darker secrets on my conscience. Even now, I cannot say that I am truly sorry. I believed that that I was doing would allow a portion of humanity to survive, although I admit that my reasons for doing so were selfish and self-serving. It is too late to rectify any of that.

After I post this letter, I will take the key to the room where you lie so still on that table and leave it for her. I hope that she will find you in time. I believe that she will find you in time. He will kill me, of course, and probably will have by the time that you receive this.

The true irony of all is that she'll probably perform the autopsy on whatever is left of this body of which I was so proud.

Do you think she'll say a prayer for my soul, Fox? Oddly enough, I hope she does. Perhaps, if someone like her prays for me, I have a hope at redemption.

I did love you. I hope that you believe that.

Goodbye,

Diana

 

The letter shook in her hands. Her nails were absent polish and somewhat ragged. She had not been able to bring herself to get a manicure.

"Why did you want me to read this, Mulder?" she asked. Her voice was strained and tired. "So I would believe I am incorruptible?" She was utterly weary of herself and of his attempt to justify her actions. "It doesn't change what I did."

He turned from the window where he had been watching the sun set in the distance and looked at her on the couch, huddled in on herself. He was quiet until she looked up at him, her face gaunt and showing the soul-sickening exhaustion she felt.

"Nobody can change the past, Scully," he said softly. "But you've fought evil and corruption, consciously and unconsciously, your whole life. What if the key to your corruption is you doubting yourself?"

"That doesn't make any sense, Mulder," she replied calmly, too tired to even raise her voice and challenge his opening argument.

"Doesn't it?" he countered, not willing to let it go. "Your religion teaches you that the Devil is offended by incorruptibility, that he teases and tempts the good into doubting themselves and their natures. What if this is your test?" 

He crossed the room to sit down on the coffee table in front of her.

Her face bore a startled, puzzled expression, but she was listening to him, finally.

"You were in shock when you pulled that trigger, Scully." He reached out and took the letter away from her, then smoothed her hands out of the clenched shape they had been assuming. "You were reacting to everything that had happened to you." He touched her face gently, not liking the feel of bone so sharp and close under her skin. "It's not an excuse. I was there. I remember." He placed a restraining finger over her lips as she moved to speak. "It can't be changed, but if this stops you from continuing to fight the larger evil that we know is coming, then who wins?"

He felt her shudder under his hands. "The Devil."

He stared into her bleak blue eyes and his voice dropped to a whisper. "He's always looking for his moment, Scully. Don't give it to him." He caressed the skin on her face. "Don't let him corrupt you into thinking that you are evil." He pulled her close against him and rocked her as the silent tears fell from her eyes. "I don't believe that your God would let you be used that way, Scully. Not for the likes of Donnie Pfaster." He kissed the top of her head and shifted himself over to the couch, picking her up and placing her on his lap where she sat rigidly, refusing the comfort he was trying to offer. 

Mulder ran his hand up and down her back, rocking her until she sighed and relaxed against him. He looked down to where she rested against his chest, her eyes half-closed against the dying light of the day.

"Do you really believe that, Mulder?" she asked.

He didn't hesitate to answer. "Yes," he said firmly. "In the end, we will be judged on the weight of all of our actions, good and bad. Isn't that what you believe?" He closed his eyes in relief as he felt the small movement of her head nodding against him. "I have seen evil, Scully. It's not in you." 

He reached behind him and pulled the afghan off the back of the couch and covered her with it. 

"It's not in you," he whispered again, rocking her back and forth, holding her as she finally fell asleep. 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

**Author's Note:**

> Author's Notes: 
> 
> Pfaster's conversation with Orison at the open grave could lead one to believe that exactly the opposite of what Scully was inferring in her final statement of the episode to Mulder was true: Orison couldn't kill Pfaster's demon soul because  
> Orison was not pure. So, who exactly used Scully to kill Pfaster? 
> 
> And isn't that quite the sticky theological proposition?
> 
>  
> 
> As always, love and kisses to my sister Suzanne and Miss Moe.


End file.
